With the final days of 2012 upon us, many companies are looking forward to “great success” in 2013. Samsung is expecting to sell 510 million mobile phones next year, which would represent a 20 percent rise compared to 2012.

Of the 510 million mobile phones it expects to sell, 390 million will be smartphones with the remainder coming from the sale of feature/budget phones.

"There are some possibilities that smartphone demand will slow in general. But we are seeing new demand for devices using Long Term Evolution (LTE),'' said Kim Hyun-joon, an executive at Samsung's telecommunications division."

Samsung also announced that it intends to build 240 million devices at its Vietnamese factory, 170 million devices in China, 20 million in India, and 40 million devices at its Korean factory. Samsung also plans to spend $2.2 billion upgrading handset factories in Vietnam by 2020 to boost output.

"By offering better pricing to consumers in developing nations, we will find new growth. This will also enable consumers in developed nations like North America and Europe to buy our LTE devices at more affordable prices,'' said a Samsung official.

Analysts are predicting that Samsung will dethrone Nokia to become the top handset shipper in the world for 2012. Nokia has held that title for 14 years.

Actually, he mentions HTC as having good screens, and they're the ones making the 5" 1080p Droid DNA. And it does have a pretty awesome display. As does my HTC 8X. I actually prefer the 4.3" screen, but choice is always good and some like the larger sizes. I'm just glad my wife likes the 4.3" "screen" too, or I'd be in trouble!

On a more serious note, removable storage and replacement batteries are critical features to some users. I would like removable storage only to be able to increase the storage on my device. I highly doubt I would even change it out once I had added a 32GB MicroSD card. That said my 25GB skydrive account more than offsets it when combined with unlimited LTE on Verizon. As for the battery, every phone I've had up until this one had a removable battery. And the only ones I ever changed were early smart phones with extended batteries. So those features, while nice, aren't terribly important to me. Of course it may be a deal breaker for you to not have them. Again, choice is fine.

They all have their strengths and weaknesses, including the iPhone. Which I would never personally own, but I did buy an iPhone 4 and now a 5 for my wife. She likes it and it requires absolutely zero involvement from me for her to do what she wants. That's great. My daughter is 7 and wants a Windows Phone, but I think we'll hold off until her 8th birthday. Hard to justify $100/month for a 7 year old...

Choice drives competition, competition drives innovation and lowers prices. We all win. Well, except Apple seems really good at ignoring the price part of that equation. I wish I owned a business that could do that.

Never owned a better phone. The keyboard is at least as good as SwiftKey and I prefer it over the iPhone/iPad keyboard because of the multiple autocorrect options. It's thin, light, feels good and ~340 ppi makes for an outstanding display. If I were on ATT I probably would have bought the 920 but after using a couple of them that my coworkers purchased, I'm truly happy I went with the 8X instead. And people comment on it all the time.

And if you have a kid, Kid's Corner is probably the greatest feature of all time. Isolated user account with access to specific apps and games, so she can't read/delete email and texts. Awesome.

This is good. All competition is good. This will help make Samsung and the others improve. The ceramic construction is more desirable than plain ol' plastic. Not as desirable as metal, buy hey, whatchagonnado?

We'll see. I hope so, but while other companies improve the quality of their screens and chassis, Samsung continues to bury them. HTC and Motorola can keep improving their hardware but as long as Samsung keeps getting away with cutting corners on quality I don't see how they'll have incentive to improve.

"This is about the Internet. Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis